HOLA from Zola! Everyone speaks Spanish here - and I am trying to learn.Madrid is awesome. I really like the park across the street from our hotel, and the big arch named for Carlos III (or should I say Charles in English?) It is called the Puerta de Alcala and it has two different sides. Carlos, who was king, could not decide which one he liked better so he had them build both. Yesterday we went to Queen Isabel's palace. It isn't her palace anymore, because she died 500 years ago, but King Juan Carlos lives there now. We walked around the inside of the palace. I liked the throne room the most. That is where the king and queen used to sit when they met with people.

The Armeria Real, which is the armory at the palace, was amazing. On the top floor there were maces, and full suits of armor, and a few fancy pistols from the 1500s, plus lot of knights mounted on horses in armor

. Then we went downstairs, where there was a bunch of guns. Felipe I had some suits of armor from when he was about six years old, so the armor was smaller than me. We saw some Japanese armor with scary masks on them, and a samurai sort of spear. There was a huge long gun that was mounted on a cart, and would have probably taken five people to shoot it.

Dad and I are doing Greek myths right now for my home schooling. We sat in the park across the street from our hotel, and I read about Titans, and Zeus and stuff like that. We had a quiz afterwards, which I got right. I liked the story about Atalanta and the wild boar of Caledonia the most of all.

Last night for dinner I tried paella, which is a combination of beef, seafood, and rice, in a nice yellowish orange sauce. The restaurant used to be a hideout for a robber called Luis Candelas, who was hanged on the city wall in Madrid about 1840. It was right in the city walls so I can see why it was a good hideout. I was very jetlagged on our first night here, but fell asleep last night before midnight, which is early in Madrid I think.